Outdoors: Racing pigeons a breed apart from their park brethren

Mark Blazis Outdoors

Racing pigeons are released at dawn from a starting point 100 to 550 miles from home so they can see visual cues and arrive at their coops before dark. But they apparently rely heavily on their brain’s magnetite, a special mineral-organ that enables them to recognize subtleties of the earth’s magnetic field. Rain will delay a race as hypothermia can prove fatal on a long-distance flight.

Taking a direct route with no tolls or stop signs, most pigeons arrive home before dark, having averaged 50 miles per hour. Keeping up with them in a vehicle is impossible. Poor flyers will take longer, though, and some never make it back.

Red-tailed, Cooper’s and sharp-shinned hawks, peregrine falcons and merlins opportunistically hunt them from above. Racers consequently don’t release pigeons low in valleys. Other hazards include electrical lines and towers. Though not yet confirmed, cellphone towers may interfere with their brain’s homing ability.

Besides the 550- and 500-mile races to Sandusky and Cleveland, Ohio, Worcester County pigeon racers also send their birds to the Ashtabula 400, Batavia 300, West Middlebury 275, Syracuse 200, Tully 200, Waterville 150 and Cherry Valley 100. A pigeon racer gradually increases the distance his birds fly. Birds with good genetics and sound training can make extraordinary flights.

The race ends when the pigeon triumphantly returns home to the racer’s coop, where it was raised and trained — and where food and possibly a mate strongly lure it back. Buying an adult champion with long-ingrained connections to another home may not result in victories for the new buyer. A previously bonded bird might well fly back to its original owner.

Technology has changed racing. Today, each pigeon wears a GPS chip on its leg. Grafton racer Pat Legor, obviously having more than just his heart invested in his passion, showed me his state-of-the-art, $2,000 satellite-controlled Benzing clock that automatically registers the precise arrival time of each returning bird as it hits a high-tech landing pad.

Such clocks are vital in pigeon racing as mere seconds may prove the difference between a winner and second place. In the old days, true flight time was compromised because the bird’s special band had to be taken off and placed in a unique clock cylinder, which was turned with a key to mark its arrival time. Legor’s collection of different era racing clocks is museum worthy.

Winning racers are great trainers who acquire genetically superior young birds, preferably less than a couple months old to allow enough time to grow up and regard their coop as their true home to which they will always be loyal.

After a young bird has been visually acclimated to its neighborhood features, sunlight and sky, it’s released for an hour each day, at first clumsily experimenting with its wings, and soon eagerly returning with better style and efficiency to food and safety. They can be conditioned to return quickly to the reward of a shaking can of food or a whistle.

Soon after they master these simplest fundamentals, Legor trucks them to a nearby park, releasing them with the hope they’ll find their way home, three or four miles away. He gradually increases distances, taking them to high spots like the Shoppes at Blackstone Valley in Millbury, where they’re less likely to be attacked by raptors from above. By eight or nine months, they’re ready for their first race — up to 300 miles. They’ll peak at age 3 or 4, but can still win races until they’re 7 or 8.

Pigeons under a year old can be good racers, but they compete together in a category that doesn’t fly more than 300 miles. Pigeons over a year old are afforded opportunities to race up to 600 miles, or 1,000 kilometers. The record distance in America is 1,800 kilometers, or 1,080 miles.

Significantly, all local races originate to our west, taking advantage of geography and prevailing westerly winds, which they apparently get used to. Our birds don’t do so well in Florida, and vice versa, because races there run north to south. Headwinds and crosswinds can also prove challenging for them.

Speed, endurance, conditioning — traits we associate with superior athletes — are all attributes of great racing pigeons. Legor broke a 25-year-old record, getting his pigeon to return from Rochester, N.Y., to his home in Grafton at an incredible speed of 2,200 yards a minute, thanks to a very high west tailwind pushing the bird forward.

Winning pigeon races is all about training and genetics, and it’s sometimes unclear whether the best birds — or the best trainers — win. It’s important to understand that distinction when purchasing a bird that can cost four figures and up.

It took Legor many years to learn essential secrets, as the top racers were seldom willing to share them. You can see the pride and excitement in his face when he talks about seeing a pigeon he raised from a chick come home loyally after racing 600 exhausting miles without stopping.

Decades ago, pigeons got considerable respect. They are, of course, the oldest domesticated bird. Part of the modern admiration for them came, no doubt, from their profound role in World War II. Carrier pigeons played heroic roles then, countless numbers of them being shot while delivering critical messages that saved thousands of lives. The Army had a pigeon signal corps, which trained and cared for the birds. They were often deployed off moving ships and proved amazingly able to find their way back to their ever-moving home at sea.

After the war, many soldiers got into raising and racing them. Legor told me our military is again training pigeons for message delivery. That development may lead to a resurgence in the sport here.

Another part of their perceived value was economic. Before telegraphs, the news agency Reuters, for example, used pigeon services to get closing stock prices between Belgium and Germany.

The fast-flying birds afforded advantages for great buying or selling opportunities. Most notably, financier Nathan Rothchild gained great advantage, learning of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo ahead of everyone else, allowing him to make a fortune in the bond market. Alas, pigeons today can’t deliver the news as fast as our telecommunications and Internet.

Walking downtown this week, I wondered about the wild pigeons on the Common and under the bridges of our highways. The feral birds are all descendants of escaped or released pigeons brought here from Europe. Some of them may have homing pigeon blood in them.

Legor has experimented with them, affording them the same training regimen he gives to his racers, and they always come up short. They never fly back from a release point farther than 80 or 100 miles. Genes matter. Park birds just don’t have the racing genetics of true homing pigeons.

You may not be able to keep the boys down on the farm once they’ve seen Paris, but you can count on great pigeons loyally flying back home from just about every place you let them go. Legor and his fellow flyers are captivated by that loyalty.

To learn more about pigeon racing opportunities, contact Central Mass. Racing Pigeon Club president Ray Cliche in Chicopee at (413) 543-5750.